The long road of American car manufacturing history is strewn with "great car" badges. Packard. Studebaker. De Soto. Oldsmobile. Now Pontiac.

But the death of Pontiac speaks more than any other retired badge to what really went wrong with the car business in this country. The bean counters and financial analysts can blame labor costs all they want, but what grounded the car industry was this: Bottom-line thinking bred mediocrity. Mediocrity pushed customers elsewhere, killing the bottom line.

See, the last great movement of passion and style and daring in American car-building -- the era of the muscle car -- was started by Pontiac and its GTO in the mid-'60s. At its heart was the last of the dashing American car designers, John DeLorean.

It was DeLorean's idea to drop a Bonneville 389-cubic-inch V-8 engine into a 1964 Pontiac Tempest, chrome it up a little, put on some racy tires and call it the "GTO" option package. In a classic DeLorean move, he took the name from a Ferrari sports car, the Gran Turismo Omologato.

"GM didn't want to do it," says Mike Williams, who is the president of the New Jersey GTO Car Clubs. "They had restrictions on engine sizes for smaller cars. But DeLorean convinced them. They thought they'd sell 5,000. They sold 35,000."

By 1966, they sold almost 100,000. The '68 might have been the coolest affordable American car ever.

Other manufacturers raced in with cars like the Plymouth Road Runner, the AMX Javelin, the Dodge Charger, the Olds 442, the Chevy Camaro and more muscular Chevelle. Ford beefed up the Mustang. They all grabbed, and held, the attention of car enthusiasts. Go to any cruise night or car show. You'll see them all.

What you won't see is much of anything more recent except Corvettes. Because after the muscle car movement, the Big Three lost their nerve and verve. They became followers, not leaders.

"Jellybeans" is what Williams calls the cars built in America after the muscle club era. All the same, just different colors. "In the 1970s, American cars lost all their pizzazz."

By the 1980s, the Japanese, and Germans to a lesser extent, were eating their lunch. You know the rest. It was downhill from there, with acrid-smoking brakes. The damage was done.

Even though quality and reliability have returned, style and innovation have not.

GM makes excellent cars today. The Buick line is as reliable and long-lasting as any German or Japanese luxury brand. Chevy trucks never stop running (my own is up to 310,000 miles and not even huffing or puffing). But the style edge still goes to the foreign cars.

"Design used to be the key," said Joe Lounsberry, a member of the GTO club. "Back then the car had to look good and not look like any other car. Can anyone tell the difference between a Ford or a Chevy from 100 feet away? They all look the same. Boring."

The decline of the car industry speaks volumes about where this country is headed.

In the 1950s, GM was the nation's largest employer. Today it's Wal-Mart. America no longer makes; it spends.

In the 1950s, GM had the political clout to change the landscape of the country. It pushed for President Eisenhower's Federal Highway Act of 1956, which built the nation's interstates. What came next was more suburbs, more drivers, more cars.

GM was also behind the end of government subsidies for the nation's trolley systems. Even city folk now needed cars. (Side note of irony: The Highway Act was GM's reward for its huge military machine contribution to World War II. But in the end, who cashed in? The Japanese and Germans.)

Fast forward to today. While our government throws uncounted, unaccounted hundreds of billions at the financial sector, the Big Three have to beg for a few billion here and a few billion there. While AIG gives away millions in bonuses, few questions asked, car execs are on the congressional carpet, being asked for solid restructuring plans.

Our government doesn't care much about manufacturing or union jobs. It would rather export our environmental problems overseas and continue to prop up the house-of-cards economy of the money-shufflers.

This is not meant to be sympathetic to the Big Three or a call for the return to the days of the muscle cars. Those days -- the days of plentiful oil from friendly sheiks and shahs, before the threat of global warming -- are long gone.

But how about some daring? A return to world-class innovation?

The Big Three should forget electric hybrids and other fuel-efficiency gimmicks that do nothing more than nickel-and-dime-down mileage. They should look to solve the big problem of finding new renewable energy, and push the building of the infrastructure to support it.

With the government's backing and blessing, they should commit to a new energy source -- like the hydrogen-oxygen car Honda is building, called the FCX Clarity. They should promise to have them in production in five years, tops, and let the filling station entrepreneurs follow. The cars may be lighter and slower, but look where fat and fast has gotten us.

The Big Three, with a little daring, could reshape the national tastes and change the landscape the way GM did in the '50s.

They could. But they won't. They're stuck in their own past. It's been more than 30 years since the first oil embargo, the day the dual-exhaust music died. And they still don't get it.

Worse yet, our government, with all the big talk about energy, isn't helping or making them get it.